Emotions are Messengers: How to Manage Emotions

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

You’ve just received a message from a colleague and it’s pushed your buttons. Really pushed your buttons. ‘How dare they write to me in that way?’ you think. ‘Why are they questioning what I said?’ you ask. As your anger rises, you feel your palms sweat and your heartbeat explode, racing to reply as fast as your fingers can type.

We all have different emotional triggers - things that make us feel angry, inadequate, sad, anxious, fearful, withdrawn. Much of this is due to our history and past experiences and can be completely automatic. Say, for example, someone once said you weren’t good at maths - and now your partner is double checking something you’ve added up. You tell them you’re able to do it on your own - and yet your partner meant no harm; they were double checking because they often need to check themselves, and wanted to help. 

Making a choice

Dealing with emotions is a natural part of life - and learning how to manage them effectively can be a life-changing skill. Managing emotions effectively isn’t about becoming a robot – it’s about giving ourselves some more space to choose how we want to respond to situations rather than getting swept up in our automatic reactions. Without knowing what to do when emotions overwhelm us, we will likely be triggered regularly and feel out of control, leading to destructive behaviours towards ourselves or others - e.g. ‘dumping’ emotions on people around us when things get intense. What this can often lead to is feeling overwhelmed and unhappy - and also having fragmented relationships. 

Emotional management is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence (EQ) , an area that impacts our lives on every level. Recent studies have even shown that EQ is a far greater determiner of life success across the board than IQ. So, in many ways, learning how to manage our emotions as they arise is one of the most significant tools we can have in our psychological toolkit. From the point of view of connecting to our inner Knowing, emotional management helps us to create a more authentic connection with ourselves. We learn to go beyond our patterns of conditioning and reaction, and instead experience more inner freedom and power. Sound good? Read on...

‘Good’ & ‘bad’ emotions vs ‘waves’

Typically, we are taught from a young age that some emotions are good and some bad – that it’s ok to feel some and not others. Perhaps your parents didn’t want you to show anger or sadness, so conditioned you to stop showing those emotions when you felt them. This is culturally normal, but it doesn’t make the feelings go away. It keeps us stuck in a pattern of resisting those emotions we don’t want to feel and rather than making it easier to resist those emotions, it makes them stronger. Those emotions end up controlling us in our psyche: as the classic psychological phrase goes, ‘what you resist persists’. 

I find it more useful to see emotions like waves: they have a natural ebb and flow. My three-year old Ezra reminds me of this daily - he can be frustrated one minute, laughing the next. No matter our age, this is how emotions are - they fluctuate. Being mentally healthy means experiencing changing moods rather than stuck states – we can’t expect ourselves to feel happy all the time and if we’re only feeling sad or angry, that’s a sign of poor mental health.

So - how big are your emotional ‘waves’, generally? Of course when going through a life event like a loss or relationship breakdown, overwhelming emotions are natural and normal. But there are also those of us who find emotions regularly overwhelming regardless of our circumstances - our emotions ‘drown’ us daily, and we can’t shake emotional states for days or weeks.  At the other extreme, we might push our emotional waves down - we don’t want to feel an emotion or experience it (consciously or not), so we repress it. This doesn’t make the emotion go away, instead it can become expressed in unhealthy ways that we might not be aware of. 

The third position psychologists have identified - which is the healthiest response to these waves - is to notice and acknowledge them as they arise, almost like they are messengers that want to be heard. We allow our emotions to be there, and this lets them pass through, so they don’t consistently drown us or burst out in destructive moments. 

Emotions as Messengers

When we can see our emotions as important messengers, we realise what they might be trying to say to help us take steps in a healthier direction. Imagine if feelings could talk;

- Loneliness might be telling me I need connection
- Shame might be telling me I need self-compassion
- Resentment might be telling me I need to forgive
- Emptiness might be telling me I need to do something engaging or creative
- Anger might be telling me I need to check in with my boundaries
- Anxiety might be telling me I need to be brave
- Stress might be telling me I need to take it one step at a time

When we can see our emotions as part of being human - no matter what we’re feeling - this can help break the cycle of emotional resistance. As the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi reminds us, ’this being human is a guest house’ – we can “meet [emotions] at the door laughing, and invite them in”. This might sound less than desired - especially for scary or overwhelming emotions - but being able to acknowledge and feel our emotions, especially the ones we don’t like, is essential to feeling balanced and steady in daily life. The more we practice not seeing emotions as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ but as messages to hear and process, the easier it becomes to sit with whichever emotion is here and let the emotions naturally pass through. Ultimately, we can’t control how we feel - but we can control how we respond to our feelings and the attitude we have towards them. 

Taking Action 

Over time, we notice there is always a gap between our feelings and the response we have to them. We become aware that we are the ones experiencing our emotions - we are ultimately more than our emotions. Starting with a pause, a deep breath and a short moment to ground ourselves goes a long way. RAIN, the tool I share below, is a great next step.

To learn how to put emotional management into practice, I’m sharing a short practical tool called RAIN over on my YouTube channel this month. This is a great technique to use when emotions are overwhelming or difficult to manage. The 4-step process invites you to:

• R – Recognise your emotions

• A – Allow your emotions to be just as they are

• I – Investigate your inner experience with kindness

• N – Non-Identification: remembering we are more than our emotions 

This practice is another route to connecting to your inner Knowing - the latest in my Know Yourself in 2021  series. I’d love to hear how you find it!